true's blog

BoingBoing.net just posted a very nice video tour of Intelligentsia's LA roasting works. The coffee used at Volta comes from the original Chicago roastery, but the BBtv piece provides a solid view into how the coffees we serve are crafted by the Intelli roast masters. We'll post part 2 of the video as soon as it is online:

Saturday, 21 June 2008; 11am

The wait is over: the summer coffee crops are on the way to Volta, and old favorites like Rwanda Zirakana and El Salvador Matalapa are being eased off the menu until next spring. With our next cupping we will be tasting the first two new coffees of the season: Intelligentsia's latest direct trade coffee from Panama, El Machete, and the Nicaragua Los Delirios.

The cupping is free and open to the public. No prior experience (beyond a love of coffee) is necessary; we'll provide instructions and guide the cupping from start to finish. A cupping is a structured tasting that is used in the specialty coffee industry to evaluate the quality of specific coffees, both in the field before auction/purchase and at the point of roasting to determine the best roast level. We'll start by evaluating the dry and wet aromas of the coffees, then move on to the "slurp" to develop an evaluation of each coffee's taste.

...and just to show that we're ahead of the curve, here's the NYTime's recent article on cupping events in New York. Be sure to watch the video of the cupping with the guys from 9th Street Espresso, in the East Village.

Our tea buyer assures us that the new crop Chinese green teas are on their way. While we wait for the samples to arrive, we've added two teas that are back in stock with our supplier:

Sencha

Sencha is a classic Japanese bittersweet green tea from Japan with a grassy aroma and slightly nutty flavor, specifically one made without grinding the tea leaves. Our sencha is less aggressive in its bite than the karigane. 6oz pot, multiple infusions.

Here's where we really start geeking out over coffee, in a (hopefully) nerdy-but-interesting way. When you ask people "what makes espresso coffee espresso?," most are at a loss to really nail down a definition. It isn't the roast level; although certain Italian espresso roasts are on the dark side, the idea that espresso roasts need to be dark and oily is just a myth. There's more truth to the idea that espresso roasts are a blend, although you can argue all night long about just what comprises an espresso blend. According to the Specialty Coffee Association of America, an espresso blend is "any combination of 'single-origin' coffees. Because few single-origin coffees provide all the flavors and aromas necessary for good espresso, baristas often blend several coffees together to achieve the taste they desire." Most espresso roasts blend together at least two different origins (like blending an Ethiopian and a Brazilian); many espresso blends also include different roast levels for the individual origins.

Every so often, a single-origin coffee contains the right combination of flavors, acidity, and mouthfeel that it can be used to create a "single origin" espresso. Single origin can mean single country of origin (drawing from many farmers or regions), single geographic region within a country, or single growing cooperative. With Intelligentsia, it more often means a directly traded coffee that involves a single farmer's crop. To celebrate the amazing work of these farmers, Intelligentsia has created a new program called the Black Cat Project. From the Black Cat Project website:

This project is rooted in our belief that espresso brewing is still coffee brewing and that only the best coffees can make the best espressos. We want to push the boundaries on flavor. We want you to experience amazing single origin, Micro-Lot and seasonal espressos with truly distinct flavor profiles that reach far beyond “chocolate” or “caramel”.

A few weeks ago, Volta was able to acquire enough of the micro-lot Black Cat Project Finca Matalapa espresso to offer it as an extremely limited espresso. Our supply lasted for about a day and a half.

This morning we received enough of the Black Cat Project Bolivia Anjilanaka to be able to offer it as a choice for any of our espresso drinks for the next week. We have many, many fans of the Anjilanaka as we serve it as a brewed coffee from the Clover. It is an entirely different beast when developed as an espresso shot. Taken as a ristretto shot, the Anjilanaka has a malty-caramel sweetness ahead of a bright mango tartness. As a cappuccino or latte, the Anjilanaka takes on a profound almond-walnut flavor.

The Black Cat Project Bolivia Anjilanaka is available served as any of our espresso drinks for a 25-cent upgrade.

We're very excited by Intelligentsia's commitment to seasonality in their coffee offerings, but it means that familiar favorites will only be available for a month or two at a time. The upside is that new coffees are always appearing on the horizon. The first new coffee of the summer season is now available at Volta: the direct trade Panama El Machete. To quote from Intelligentsia's overview of the coffee,

El Machete bursts forth with notes of berry and candied maple without hesitation. Its body is round, buttery and smooth, complementing the acidity of sweet citrus fruits. The finish champions the juiciness of its acidity as cocoa notes surface in the finish in tandem with immensely tantalizing floral notes.

Our take on El Machete? Yowza! It is one of those coffees that elicits an immediate "I didn't know that coffee could taste like that." Or, as of of our barista says, "sharp and classy."

With a new offering from Nicaragua available to us next week, we'll be waiting a few more days before we schedule the next public cupping.

The Vosges Mo's Bacon Bar was one of the first chocolate bars to sell out at Volta. Really. There's much love for chocolate and bacon in Gainesville. As Aufeya would say, how can you go wrong with crunchy, bacon-y goodness mixed with a medium-dark chocolate. The bacon bar is back in stock, and we've added two flavors that didn't make it into our first stocking order. The Naga bar was named and inspired by the tribes of Northeast India. The Naga melds the flavors of toasted milk, sweet Indian curry, nutty coconut and an overall sensation of warm, rounded spice. Next up? The Woolloomooloo bar. As Vosges describes it, this chocolate bar is named after the famed suburb Woolloomooloo in Sydney and meant to honor the Aboriginal claim to the scrumptious macadamia nut. Hemp seeds are the true secret weapon in this bar—packed with essential fatty acids vital to your body. Boost your vanity too; hemp oil will provide softer skin, stronger nails and thicker hair. Shine inside and out.

We've also picked up a new assortment of the indulgent Vosges exotic caramels. This sampler includes the Brazil nut and cocoa nib caramel, the guajillo chile, licorice root, and pumpkin seed caramel, the Hawaiian red sea salt caramel, and the anise myrtle carmel.

A quick update on available coffees: we received our final shipment Rwanda Zirakana today. The Zirakana has been one of the staff and customer favorites since we opened, and we will miss its citrus spice in the mornings when we dial in the Clover. We picked up enough Zirakana that we can also offer it as a bulk coffee, whole bean or ground to order, for $14 a pound.

We also received one final shipment of the amazing Los Inmortales micro-lot coffee from the Finca Matalapa. We previously featured Los Inmortales as our first reserve offering, and it sold out in two days. We have enough this time to last about the week, but it could go faster. Los Inmortales is available for $3.50.

Next up: Panama El Machete. We'll schedule a public cupping as soon as we have an arrival date.

Volta is pleased to announce a showing of collage works by John Patterson. John's work is the first organized exhibition of local artwork to grace the walls of the shop (not counting the "Volta permanent collection" of a flock of birds by Katie Levy over on the chocolate wall).

John's work involves the meticulous cutting of advertising tins to create the material for large-scale collages. We'll be posting an extensive essay by another of our customers to provide some historical context for appreciating John's work. In his own words, here's how John explains his approach:

This body of work is the result of my layman study of neurology and my love of the cookie tin. In the last 20 years or so the field of neurology has exploded with fresh insight and spectacular advances, unraveling the mysterious underpinnings of our own cognitive life. Along with all of this has come a great many books that ride a line between the purely academic and what the rest of us can grasp. Add in a crafty ghost writer and you might be surprised how entertaining the brain can be.
The pieces on display are not meant to be an abstract representation of a brain; rather, they are a thought. They represent a sampling of the myriad associations our subconscious mind uses to tell our consciousness what is going on.

A key factor I wanted to get across was the nonlinear aspect of the organization, that connections can sprout in any direction. I chose cookie tins to work with because of their durability, because the art would not need to be put behind glass. The process was also so labor intensive and somewhat dangerous (paper cuts are nothing!) that I will not have to worry about competition...

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we've sold out of our allotment of Black Cat Project single origin El Salvador espresso. We'd like to thank our friends at Intelligentsia for giving us the chance to serve a unique single origin espresso; I think we were able to do justice to an amazing coffee. My own first shot was full of maple-spice goodness that was both unexpected in its intensity and yet subtle and pleasing in body and aftertaste. We are almost sold out of the Brazil pulp natural (we might have six or seven cups left), but we're working on bringing in one more batch of the Los Inmortales micro-lot to serve up on the Clover.

We've also sold out of all of the jamaica that I had in stock. We've ordered in several pounds of new hibiscus flowers, but we won't know if the quality is up to par until the shipment arrives next week. I'm certainly hoping so-- we sold out of every batch that we made this week.